Winter is nearly upon us and with it comes the great winter scam, gritting, and local councils are blowing more smoke up their anal canals telling us just how good they are when in reality they are fleecing us. Traditionally they use rock salt to grit the roads and then they only grit major roads and bus routes, so where is the scam?

They use rock salt, to deliver this they use a fleet of lorries which use multi body technology which means they have chassis cab lorries with standard mountings which accept a range of different bodies on the same lorry which can quickly be changed, they then have to employ a number of drivers and pay them a premium rate for working nights, some also work all day and they return to do a night shift and they have these lorries rolling every night throughout a period of freezing weather which adds to the cost. These gritting bodies take a lot of hammer as rock salt corrodes cars and lorries using the roads and the steel gritting lorry bodies take a condiderable pounding from this rock salt. So where is the scam? because they are using the most expensive and old fashioned methods to deliver this rock salt and the taxpayers are footing the bill.

Modern alternatives are available and these are a plastic like pellet which is delivered in much the same way as rock salt, but is non corrosive and does not damage cars and lorries; it works by using state of the art delivery systems so one lorry can drive on one side of the road and the roads are read and the system delivers the correct amount of the pellets and cover the entire road with just one pass of the lorry. Gritting bodies are not affected by this synthetic grit so maintaining them is much easier and cheaper, These pellets work by being delivered during the day and not at night, saving on wages, and they are spread by the lorries and they rely on cars and lorries running over them which breaks then and forces them into the cracks in the tarmac road surface, they are temperature and moisture activated and when the temperature drops to about +2 degrees they begin working, if the temperature drops they are ahead of the game and warming the road surface up and as they melt the forming ice the moisture from it basically supercharges them and they go into hyper melt and often prevent ice from forming on the road.

What is the catch? actually they cost twice as much as rock salt but they last around 8-14 days depending upon type so you only apply them to a road every week/fortnight and forget them, no need for gritting the same roads two or three times a day when you only need to do them every 8-14 days and costings reveal for a county such as Buckinghamshire they can do EVERY road and not just main roads for less than half the current costs. Derbyshire bought in 700 tonnes of rock salt in 2017 and if they used the synthetic grit they could have done the same amount of roads using only 100 tonnes of the synthetic salt at twice the price which means the same cost of buying 200 tonnes of rock salt.